A conversation on the exhibition floor with two presidents of TiE Surat, the man who conceived 21BY72, a Vodafone India chief technology officer, and the founder of Insiders Club.
On the exhibition floor of the summit, at one of the advisory stands, in company that between them accounts for several decades of building at national scale. Sanjay Punjabi founded the Surat chapter of TiE and served as its first president, and has run an architecture and planning practice since 1994 besides; he chairs Mission 84, the Southern Gujarat Chamber’s programme for carrying the region’s smaller manufacturers into international trade. CA Jignesh Shah, a founder charter member of that same chapter, is its president today. An institution’s first president and its current one, in one frame, is not a common thing to be standing inside.
Nilesh Vohra is chief technology officer for Vodafone India’s global capability centre and group chief technology officer at Cab-E, after two decades across Wipro in Australia, Tech Mahindra and Rolta in the United Kingdom, and an advisory seat at McKinsey on deep tech for telecom. Rachit Poddar conceived 21BY72 itself — the floor everyone was standing on — and is co-founder and director of IVY Growth Associates and managing partner at Arigato Capital: he builds the room and funds what walks into it. Jay Desai, a chartered accountant by training, founded Insiders Club, an invitation-only room for founders, operators and investors, and has made a profession of getting people who build things to say plainly how they did it.
Set side by side they describe a full circuit rather than a guest list — someone who founded the institution, someone who runs it now, someone who has carried enterprise technology at national scale, someone who capitalises the next attempt, and someone who makes sure the account of it survives. Very little in any career happens outside one of those five functions. An afternoon standing where all five overlap teaches more about how ventures actually get built than a season of reading about it.
What that kind of company gives you is not advice. Advice is cheap and mostly generic. It is calibration. People operating at that level are close to impossible to impress with an idea and very easy to interest with an execution, and the scrutiny arrives from four directions at once — who it serves, what happens to it under load, what it replaces, and whether you can say it in one sentence. A piece of work has to answer all four. Listening to which of them your own work answers worst is the cheapest education available.
Divyakush Punjabi was the youngest person in that circle by a wide margin and the only one there without a track record to point at. The honest thing to record is what the conversation changed rather than that it happened: a corrected reading of the distance still to cover, and the practical discovery that the fastest way to earn time from people that far ahead is to arrive with one specific question rather than a pitch, then be quiet and take the answer seriously. Access of that kind is not a credential. It is an opportunity to find out precisely how far short you currently fall, from people with no reason to soften it.
A standard set by people who have already done the thing is a better one to work to than any standard you would set for yourself, because yours is calibrated to what you can currently do. The one on that floor was an enterprise standard, and it is a harder one: not whether a system demonstrates, but whether it stays up, whether somebody who has never met you can operate it, and whether it survives being handed over. Every project further along this timeline was built to that number — multi-tenant platforms carrying real tenants, retrieval systems that answer from sources they can cite, models that ship behind an interface somebody else maintains. Standing in that room reset the measure. The work since has been the argument.
Divyakush Punjabi